World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
It’s NEW RELEASE ROUNDUP DAY and Sense And Sensibility and Heart of the Beast lead a genuinely eclectic UK Friday; Avengers: Endgame and Manhunter return to cinemas for encores; there’s a separate US-only slate; a farewell to French New Wave icon Marina Vlady; and Happy Birthday to Bella Ramsey.
Morning all — a proper end-of-September Friday today, on both sides of the Atlantic, plus a sad goodbye to an icon of French cinema. Here’s what happened in the world of movies during the last 24 hours.
A packed Friday at UK cinemas: Leading today’s slate is Universal’s Sense And Sensibility (my review to follow), Georgia Oakley’s follow-up to Blue Jean, reuniting Daisy Edgar-Jones and George MacKay after their US mid-month release — alongside Fiona Shaw, Frank Dillane and Herbert Nordrum. Paramount’s The Heart Of The Beast — David Ayer’s Brad Pitt-led doggie survival thriller, releasing in both US and UK — brings the genre thrills, while Mubi’s Nicolas Winding Refn’s unhinged sexy-violent thriller Her Private Hell and Picturehouse’s Korean horror Hope offer sharper edges. Also released today from Metis is the excellent babystar, a searing story of the dangers of family videoblogging which I found excellent. Smaller releases from Dartmouth (nature-documentary North Sea, Nature Untamed), Peccadillo (provocative LGBTQ film Blue Film) and BUFF Studios (Middle-East-set drama Shadows Of Beirut) round things out. For the nostalgic, Disney brings Avengers: Endgame Encore back to the big screen, complete with six additional minutes (which, I understand, might vary by format) ahead of December’s Doomsday — a move that’s split fans between “must-see on the big screen” and “cynical cash-grab” in roughly equal measure. Another re-release today is the 40th anniversary ‘Final Cut’ of Michael Mann’s Manhunter from StudioCanal – a murderous Canadian road-trip thriller.
Meanwhile, over in the US: American screens get their own separate slate today. Lionsgate’s animated Forgotten Island, from the same stable as the massive KPop Demon Hunters brings a starry voice cast including H.E.R., Dave Franco and Jenny Slate. (UK audiences will need to wait until October 16th for it). Also, Greenwich Entertainment’s comedy documentary You Had To Be There — tracing how a legendary 1972 Toronto staging of Godspell launched the careers of Mike Myers, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy and Martin Short — expands country-wide after last week’s limited debut. Finally, Yael Bridge’s documentary Who Moves America, focused on Teamsters (that’s ‘trade unions’ to Brits) in UPS, has also opened in limited US release.
A farewell to French New Wave icon Marina Vlady: Away from new releases, French actress, singer and writer Marina Vlady has died aged 88. Born Marina Catherine de Poliakoff-Baydaroff in Clichy, she built a career spanning decades of French cinema, perhaps most famously starring in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her — a defining face of an entire era of European filmmaking, now gone.
Happy birthday to Bella Ramsey: Rounding things off, happy birthday today to The Last of Us and Game of Thrones actor Bella Ramsey, who turns 22.
That’s your lot for today — between Sense And Sensibility’s UK bow and Endgame’s cinema return, there’s plenty to fill a weekend cinema trip. Until next time.
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